Project description:Monodelphis domestica develops ex utero. Here, we have investigated the changes in the transcriptomics of adipose tissue during juvenile development to get further insights into the reprograming in marsupial mammals.
Project description:Marsupials have been a powerful comparative model to understand mammalian biology. However, because of the unique characteristics of their embryology, marsupial pluripotency architecture remains to be fully understood, and nobody has succeeded in developing embryonic stem cells (ESCs) from any marsupial species. We have developed an integration-free induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) reprogramming method and established validated iPSC lines from two fully inbred strains of the gray short-tailed opossum (Monodelphis domestica). A comprehensive characterization of the M. domestica skin fibroblasts and their reprogrammed iPSCs was performed by genome-wide mRNA sequencing. The established monoiPSCs showed a significant (6,181 DE genes) but highly uniform (between clone r2 at 95% CI = 0.973 ± 0.007) resetting of the cellular transcriptome during reprogramming and were highly similar to eutherian ESCs and iPSCs in their overall transcriptomic and functional profiles. However, monoiPSCs showed unique regulatory architecture of the core pluripotency transcription factors and were more like epiblasts. Our results suggest POU5F1 and the splice variant specific expression of POU5F3 synergistically regulate the opossum pluripotency gene network. It is plausible that POU5F1, POU5F3 splice variant XM_016427856.1, and SOX2 form a self-regulatory network. NANOG expression, however, was specific to monoiPSCs and epiblasts, and displayed a distinct expression profile in embryonic cells. Furthermore, POU5F1 was highly expressed in trophectoderm cells, whereas all other pluripotency transcription factors were significantly downregulated, suggesting that the regulatory architecture of core pluripotency genes of marsupials may be distinct from that of eutherians.
